You need to make a marketing video. You’ve told yourself this a million times. Creating videos, like explainer videos, for your marketing endeavors can seem overwhelming and time-consuming. Truth is, it is time-consuming. You can’t up and decide one today that you’re going to record video footage and be done with it. Marketing videos that engage the audience and convert leads into buyers take a lot of careful planning.

Once you have a video that you’re satisfied with, then you have to focus on how you’re going to integrate it with your digital marketing efforts.

Don’t know where to begin on creating a video or infographic marketing strategy? If so, you’re not alone. Millions of brands just like yours struggle with crafting a video strategy that results in a strong ROI. Thankfully, we’ve done all the heavy research for you and we’ve put together a helpful go-to guide for video content marketing that you can lean on.

Video Strategy 101: Knowing How to Create Videos That Attract and Convert Leads Into Buyers

With a $5 million budget, you’ll find it fairly simple to create a video marketing strategy. After all, you can outsource all of the involved tasks to an agency that excels in creating engaging and successful video content. But what if you don’t have a $5 million budget? What if you’re a small business operating on a startup budget? Does this leave you floating in the wind with no real way to create a video strategy that will actually attract leads and increase conversions?

Regardless of your budget, you can create a scalable video marketing strategy that translates into the development of quality visual content that educates, entertains, and inspires your audience. Most importantly, visual content that moves the audience to the bottom of the marketing funnel.

Step 1: Define Your Purpose

Why do you want to create a video marketing strategy? To convert existing leads? Attract new leads? Educate your audience? Inspire your audience? Did you answer yes to all of these questions?

Your answers to these questions will help you create a strategy that aligns with your goals. Creating a strategy that simply expands brand awareness is much different than creating one that moves existing leads further through the funnel.

You must be specific as possible when defining your purpose. Take for example your goal is to “sell more accounting software packages.” This is a great goal, but why should your audience care? After all, there are thousands, if not millions, of other accounting software packages to buy. A more defined goal of “sell more accounting software packages to help customers save time, decrease human error, and lower invoice processing costs” is a much better purpose.

Ultimately, your business goal should be to educate your audience on your brand, entertain them with video content that they want to share with others, and inspire them to make a purchase. Don’t intend for the video marketing strategy to be a promotional platform. Instead, design it with the intention of making it a media experience that everyone will want to be a part of.

To truly determine what the purpose of your video strategy is going to be, you must:

Know who your audience is

Research to get a thorough understanding of what it is that your audience likes to buy, likes to share, and has the monies to afford

Define the types of video content that will resonate with the audience; explainer videos, social video ads, 3D animations, etc.

If you don’t know who your target audience, there’s no need to fret. There are millions of companies that somehow find a bit of success without ever pinpointing and studying their consumers. However, if they would take the time to study their audience, they would be far more successful.

Creating a buyer persona should be the first step you take for any marketing agenda you create. It will serve as a solid foundation for all of your marketing efforts.

Consumers go through three stages: Awareness, consideration, and decision. The stage they are in will determine which video types you need to target them with. You can effectively target them with a marketing strategy that contains the right types of content unless you know who they are, thus being another reason you need a buyer persona.

Step 2: Decide What Brand Language You Want to Convey

Do you want your brand to be remembered as a playful brand? A serious brand? A brand that constantly talks in a formal, high-level language? A funny brand?

No two brands are the exact same. You must clarify the tone and style you want your brand to exhibit in the videos you create; this is key to brand recall. A viewer should be able to watch one of your videos without knowing it’s one of yours and still be able to say “hey, that’s one of Company XYZ’s videos” simply by the tone and language he or she hears while watching it.

Once you know who your audience is, the purpose of your video strategy, and the tone and style of the language you are going to use, it then becomes time to start creating video content.

Before you get ahead of yourself, though, you first need to pick out which video types you want to create. Check out our Types of Video Marketing article to learn more about the most effective types of video content and why you need to use them.

Explainer videos, whiteboard animations, and 3D animations tend to be three of the most effective format types. When carefully curated, all three of these types have an enormous potential to educate and entertain your audience. They also do a great job of inspiring your audience to make a purchase.

Still yet, before you can choose which types of videos you are going to create, you’ll first need to decide where they are going to be published. A video being published on a landing page can be much longer than a video that’s going on social media. The audience on your social platforms will want bite-size, short and sweet videos. You can even make a longer version of the short ones to post on your site’s landing pages.

In addition to choosing video types and publishing platforms, you’ll also need to decide which topics you are going to feature in the videos. Sure, you want to create a video that promotes your brand, but you only need one of those. All of the other videos should have a specific topic.

Let’s go back to the accounting software example. Doing a 10-second video on how simple it is to scan, upload, and process an invoice would be a great topic to cover. This shows how easy it is to automate invoice processing. Any business that does invoice processing will be interested in learning how simple it is to process invoices using automation software. Imagine if you published a new 10-second video on a specific feature of the accounting software each week. You could garner a huge following thanks to the usefulness and relevancy of the information you are providing.

Step 4: It’s Time to Create Video Content

The next step in creating an effective video marketing strategy involves the actual creation of the content. For many brands, this is where they get stuck. They know who their audience is, the types of video they need to create, the platforms they are going to publish on, and the topics they are going to cover. What they don’t know is how to create a video.

There are different templates you can use to create your video content. Common templates that make it easy for video creation include those for:

Product explainer videos

Regular explainer videos

Animation videos

Behind-the-scenes videos

Case study videos

Educational videos

No matter the type of video you are creating, it must have high-quality footage and audio. In addition, you need to make sure it evokes emotion even if the sound is turned off. Many viewers watch the video without the sound turned on, so you must keep this in mind when creating the footage. There’s a lot that goes into creating a script for a video. Not only do you have the actual script creation process, but you must ensure it is telling a story that is relevant to the purpose of the video.

Once you have the script in place, then the design process starts. You’ll need a team of professionals who excel in video design, graphics, animations, etc. The exact type of video you are creating will determine which design aspects need to be included.

You may be tempted to create the video yourself, but unless you are familiar with making high-quality visual content, it’s best to let an agency do it for you. This agency will understand the specifics of creating content that hooks the viewer in the first 10 seconds. It will also know how to properly overlay CTAs throughout various parts of the video that converts the viewer. The goal is to get your audience to want to know more so that they will contact your brand. You should consider working with influencers to promote your videos. An agency will have valuable connections with entities that can take care of the promotional process, ensuring your content lands in front of massive audiences. More importantly, in front of your intended audience. Also involved in the video creation process is the development of video caption. Your caption will likely make or break whether the audience actually hits the play button; this is especially true when publishing videos on social media. Your captions should always be clear and to the point and must elicit some type of emotional reaction. Even better, you want the caption to persuade the viewer to leave a comment and share the video with their friends. Most times, a strong, simple statement works best as a caption as well as an interesting question.

Step 5: Promoting the Video

After the video has been created, it then comes time to publish and promote it. If possible, you will have already promoted it during its creation process through some type of email campaign. Take for example you are creating a FAQs video. You can send out emails to your subscribers alerting them of a new video that is soon to be published that will answer some of their most frequently asked questions. This gets the audience hyped and on the lookout for the video.

As we already mentioned, teaming up with influencers is a great way to promote video content. But I don’t know any influencers. That’s perfectly understandable. A video creation company will know various entities and tips and tricks for promoting your video in the most effective ways.

But I don’t have the funds to pay an influencer to promote my video content. That’s perfectly understandable, too. Did you know you can lean on your friends, bloggers, and other businesses to help you promote it? The more people you have spreading your content, the bigger the reach you’ll establish. Many businesses and friends and other bloggers will be more than willing to share and promote your video for a small fee.

No matter the video being shared, you need to share it on as many platforms as possible. This includes your own website, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.

Step 6: Testing the Videos Using Metrics

The last step in creating a solid video marketing strategy involves the use of metrics. Not all of your videos are going to be a huge hit. You need to pinpoint which ones fall into this category and steer clear of focusing your funds and resources on them. You can’t identify them, though, unless you use metrics. You’ll also want to see which videos are providing the strongest ROI; these are the types of videos you want to devote the majority of your resources and funds to. There are tons of analytics and tools, particularly optimization tools, that you can use to see which videos are performing the best and which ones aren’t. But I don’t have time to measure each video’s effectiveness. Professional video creation companies understand this pain point and this is why they offer metric services. They can perform A/B testing to see which elements of the videos are performing the best. When you test two videos against one another — especially two versions of the same video — you can identify which message is resulting in the best ROI. You’ll also see which video is delivering the best engagement. You can then alter your video marketing strategy to focus on creating more videos with those specific elements.

Are you ready to create a video marketing strategy that’s specifically tailored to your brand? If so, contact IGW today.